


Mistakes

by ohmyfae



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: But Mostly fluffy, F/F, Implied/Referenced Character Death, if that makes sense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-12
Updated: 2017-01-12
Packaged: 2018-09-17 01:15:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9297752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmyfae/pseuds/ohmyfae
Summary: Gentiana keeps making the same mistakes, time after time.Some endgame spoilers, so beware.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to explore what it would be like for a former goddess to keep falling in love with humanity.

Gentiana had made a mistake.

She had done quite well for herself over the past millennia. She spent nearly a century in the ice floes of a frozen river, watching the gentle fall and rise of the dunes at the riverbank as humans tried (and failed) and tried (and failed, again) to set up boardwalks and safe havens at the water’s edge. She’d wandered in a cool breeze over Altissia for a time, flipping cards on game tables, causing gondola captains to tug their vests tight over their chins, painting her image with frost on shop windows. Before the Oracle was born, she’d settled in a field of deep blue flowers in Tenebrae, where the chill of her touch made spiraling furrows in the ground.

The Oracle found her there. She was a young thing (as all humans were young), with light blond hair and a stubborn look in her eyes. She reminded Gentiana of the humans she used to love, back at the end of all things, when the man who consumed the Starscourge was still a bright-eyed young man with an open heart and a tongue for blasphemy. He’d made her laugh, once, and hadn’t turned away when the cold in her throat froze the air around them. He’d simply run his hands through the crystals of frost that hung round her laughter, and smiled, and called her beautiful. And when he killed her, she’d held his face with hands so cold they burned his skin, and cursed him, cursed him.

“You’re a messenger,” the Oracle said, standing barefoot in the blossoms of Tenebrae.

“Yes,” Gentiana said. “Do you have need of me, little one?”

“Only if you’ll allow it,” said the girl. 

Gentiana had smiled, then, and opened her eyes, and all of the blossoms around her crackled with ice as fine as lace.

She should have known better.

\---

Luna did not often give way to grief.

There were times when she would go silent, thoughtful, the skin of her face drawn tight as she struggled to contain some wellspring of emotion. She’d clench her fists in her skirts and force herself to smile, drag her feet through yet another round of healing, purifying, soft, compassionate conversation with the pained and the dying. Then she would go home, and press her head to the long window of her chambers, and Gentiana would find her there.

“Tell me about what it was like before,” she said, the first time.

“Is that an order?” Gentiana had asked, barely holding on to her corporeal form.

“No. A request. I think.” The hesitancy in Luna’s voice was startling, and Gentiana leaned down to sit on the other side of the window. She raised a hand to the glass, and Luna hissed and withdrew at the sudden shock of ice spiraling outward from Gentiana’s fingers. Then Gentiana ran her forefinger down the ice once, twice, and made a slow curve to connect the lines.

“This was the sign of the first King,” she said, “Before the darkness came. The language they used then was lost, but some of us remember.”

“Can you teach it to me?” Luna asked. She sat up, staring at the unfamiliar lettering with something like hunger. 

“Of course,” Gentiana said. Luna had such resilience, for one who had undergone so much. Would she, too, have buckled under the weight of the Scourge? What was there in the strength of her Oracle that was absent in her fallen King?

 _Her_ Oracle. Gentiana sighed. She was too quick to bend, too fickle, too fond. Deep-hearted scraps of humanity like this one, like the one who had killed her, like the ones who had held her and whispered warm secrets into her lips before the dark, would always be the death of her.

\---

Years later, Luna stood in the outer garden of her rooms in Tenebrae, braced as though for a fight. Her hair was loose on her shoulders, her chin raised, and she looked so achingly familiar that Gentiana felt like she was dying again, spite on her tongue and a heat in her side. Gentiana came to her, then, smile faint and unassuming.

“I know you love me,” Luna said, in a voice that shook. With cold? With apprehension? Gentiana couldn’t tell, wouldn’t open her eyes to see into the heart of this impermanent creature. “You know I feel the same.”

“You don’t,” Gentiana said. She felt warm fingers brush hers, and slip away. “All my years, Lunafreya, it has never been the same.” 

“Does it have to be?”

Gentiana said nothing, and then Luna was there, hands on hers, legs pressed to Gentiana’s robes. Gentiana opened her mouth to her, savored the warmth of her lips, held her hair as she kissed back. Careful, careful. There was blood on her tongue, a distant familiar taste that made her open her eyes and step away. 

Luna coughed, having inhaled the ice of Gentiana’s breath. Her lips were chapped and cracking, and her cheeks were flushed a brilliant pink. 

“Give me a minute,” she gasped, “and we can try that again.”

That startled a laugh out of Gentiana at last, and the air around them crystalized, white flakes drifting in a sudden stillness. Luna unbent, and lifted a hand to the air wonderingly. She waved her fingers through the drifts, making them dance, and turned to Gentiana with a look of awe.

“Gentiana,” she said. “That’s beautiful. _You’re_ beautiful.”

\---

Gentiana had made a mistake. But then, she always had been a fool.

**Author's Note:**

> (Things I kept thinking as I wrote this: We get it, self, she's an ice goddess. She's cold. Freezing. A bit on the chilly side. She is, in fact, the opposite of warm. Way to be subtle.)


End file.
